Ego shouldn’t deter kindness

Time and time again I’m faced with this challenge of dealing with people who make you feel like you’re worthless. It’s almost become natural for people to treat you as if you aren’t human. We play this game of who’s right and wrong, who’s on the far left and far right, who’s better or worse, and who’s good or bad. We sit here and do all this, yet we forget what it means to just be a good person to one another.

Before I go on, this is in no way a piece referencing any specific events that have occurred recently. This is just something that has been on my mind for quite some time that I wanted to pass on to readers.

It’s tough sometimes. People get on our nerves and we start to hurt each other when this does happen. But we all allow ourselves to let our anger and distaste for one another cloud the fact that we’re all humans. While we may be different in our personalities, we are all humans.

A lot of the time we let power and money determine who we are and what we stand for. We wake up every day, we plan for the upcoming years of our life. We accumulate as much money as possible, invest in a lot of unnecessary things, and fight each other based on the colour of our skin. We hate each other for the most minimal things, and we choose to fight instead of choosing to love. At the end of the day, we argue with each other but fail to remember that we don’t carry these material things with us when we die.

As morbid as that may be, and as much as we refuse to talk about it, it’s the truth.

What baffles me the most is that we go out every day, sometimes with the intention of being nothing but the worst to people.

But many of us never wake up and tell ourselves that maybe, just maybe, we should be good to each other. Why is that?

Well, being good doesn’t get me good grades. Being a good person won’t get me into graduate school. Being a good person won’t let me start a business, be rich, and the list goes on.

And it’s true. Being good to one another brings you none of these things. But what it does bring you is peace of mind. If we constantly spend our lives being angry at everyone and everything, we waste our time putting effort into nothing. All we’re doing is getting ourselves worked up so that we can fulfill our own egos to tell the world, “Hey, I’m right.” This is what becomes problematic. Our egos get in the way of everything. We wrap ourselves in this mentality that the only thing that matters in the world is what people think of you, and how you can use your ego to further yourself in this world, even if it means putting those who care for you behind you and making them feel worthless.

I’m not writing this to tell you that the world needs to be this utopia of perfection. What I am trying to say is that sometimes it doesn’t hurt to wake up and tell ourselves that maybe we can be good to one another. We need to separate ourselves from this goal of uplifting our egos by putting others down.

Sure, it can be argued that being a good person won’t change the world, and maybe it won’t. But being a good person to one another can change one person’s world. If you tell someone who’s been depressed, who’s literally felt like their life has hit rock bottom, that they matter and reinforce that thought into them, you just might make their world that much better.

At the end of the day, we are all people with wants and needs, and sometimes we let ourselves slip and forget what it means to just be a good person. And that’s okay, but we must remind ourselves that getting angry, and yelling, and choosing to fight rather than choosing to help one another will get us nowhere. I don’t deny that it is almost natural for us to want to dislike one another, but I also don’t deny that we can all be good to each other.

You never know until you try. It’s weird, at the end of a Futurama episode, there was this line that a character said: “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” And it’s true that we all focus on the negative and that’s what stands out more to us in this world. That’s what makes juicy headlines and allows us to judge another person. And that’s what I think is wrong with us. We judge people for their skin, their actions, their clothing, their personality, and so on, yet we never judge the person based on what good they’ve done.

The point I’m trying to make here is that we as a community need to look at each other in our simplest form: human. We need to be good to each other as often as we can and respect one another. We need to stop judging each other based on who has the most power and money, and learn to understand that we are all different. Our differences shouldn’t divide us, but they should teach us to accept one another and be there for one another. Because at the end of the day, we need to learn to use our hearts to help those in need.

So, the next time you wake up, tell someone you love them, tell them how much you appreciate them, even something as simple as helping them with whatever they need help with. In a society that tells us otherwise, teach yourselves to be good to one another, and to love and care for the people around you.